Hristo Botev wrote: ↑Thu Oct 29, 2020 7:08 am
To quote Russell Kirk, "There is nothing more conservative than conservation." Granted, Kirk's conservatism (and that of Roger Scruton) is very different from the more cosmopolitan types, who push for progress at all costs.
i agree on the conservative aspect of conservation, semantically at least, but i never see it in politics. most “conservatives” these days either deny climate change, or deny that we have anything to do with it, or deny that we can do anything about it. it’s more free market/free enterprise types, blind to externalities.
which points to something i wanted to mention earlier: the broadness of the conservative label makes it impossible really to come up with a consistent position on the matter. eg i find the amish more conservative than the koch brother still surviving, but the kochs shaped the debate for decades while the amish are traditionally silent beyond their borders (i think, having never heard from them).
from scruton i’ve only read his aesthetics of music and he comes across as nothing if not cosmopolitan—culturally at least. not really familiar with his politics, but i was not a fan of his aesthetic reasoning, ha ha.
my experience with rural folk is that being at the forefront of natural depredation they tend to be
for depredation—yes, some wise souls among them do see value in conservation (e.g. some smart ranchers i know work together with environmentalists) but others can’t see past the quick payoff, and damn what comes after. short-termism is universal.
suburban and city people on the other hand as you’ve pointed elsewhere tend to virtue signal more than reduce their actual demand for resources, which they don’t actually see mined or logged or farmed—nevertheless, some do make the effort, same as it happens among the rurals. unfortunately, just as elsewhere, they’re a minority.
nevertheless, this is where consumer demand comes from, and free enterprise attempts to respond to it with supply, either real or fake (or both). this nexus might be the only relevant locus of control at a global scale—at least under capitalism.